چکیده انگلیسی

Governing agencies increasingly employ collaborative forms of decision-making in fisheries management to improve decision quality and legitimacy. However, crafting fair and effective collaborative processes that will achieve these benefits is often difficult. In an effort to identify keys and obstacles to success, this research examined participants’ evaluations of a collaborative planning process in Canada's Pacific groundfish fisheries. Results indicate that an incentive to participate, consensus decision-making, and independent facilitation were essential to ensuring the fairness and effectiveness of the process. Together, these elements motivated agreement while providing security against process manipulation by both participants and governing agencies.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Resolving conflicting objectives among stakeholders regarding the use of limited fisheries resources is one primary challenge for sustainable fisheries management [1]. Developing well-informed management strategies in a way that respects tenets of procedural justice is another [2]. Collaborative forms of planning have demonstrated promise for addressing challenges like these and their use is growing [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12] and [13]. However, research has also found that crafting fair and effective collaborative processes is often difficult, and not simply a matter of ‘more’ stakeholder involvement [14].
Despite the difficulties and their growing use, collaborative fisheries planning processes have rarely been the subject of systematic evaluation that comprehensively assesses their performance. This paper begins to address that gap. It evaluates the Commercial Groundfish Initiative, a recent multi-sectoral planning process tasked with reforming the management of Canada's Pacific groundfish fisheries. The evaluation focuses on fairness and effectiveness, two procedural attributes frequently associated with high-quality collaborative decision-making processes [4], [15], [16], [17], [18] and [19]. Using a framework of criteria derived from empirical literature, the research sought participants’ perceptions of the performance of the planning process on these attributes. Participants’ perspectives are useful for designing collaborative processes that are acceptable to stakeholders—an important criterion in considering a process model's suitability for future use [20] and [21]. Collaborative planning also demands significant commitments of time and money from participants and sponsoring agencies. Determining whether and why these processes are successful can help ensure that both of these limited resources are spent effectively [22]. Results provide early feedback on a decision-making format that has been promoted for Canadian fisheries in recent legislation and policy reviews [23] and [24].
The balance of the paper is divided into five sections. It begins with a review of the rationale for, and challenges of, collaborative planning, and then provides a case description. The methods and results sections follow. The paper closes with a discussion of keys and obstacles to success and the practical implications of participants’ evaluations for collaborative fisheries planning process design.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

Despite mistrust, inexperience working together, and inexperience with the consensus format, the CIC successfully developed a proposal for integrated groundfish management that was adopted by DFO. Many interviewees expressed surprise that the CIC was able to generate a proposal acceptable to the diverse interests of the different fisheries at the table, and stated that such an achievement was possible due largely to the design of the planning process. The results suggest that three design elements were indispensable: (1) a shared incentive to participate, (2) consensus-based decision-making, and (3) independent facilitation. The absence of any one of these three elements would have likely precluded the possibility of the CIC reaching a comprehensive agreement on fisheries management reforms that all participants could live with, if not endorse.
The three indispensable elements related differently to fairness and effectiveness. The perceived ability of the consensus model to be effective was mediated primarily by the strength of the incentive to participate. Implicit here is the importance of the CIC's exclusively commercial membership to DFO's ability to construct an effective incentive. Participants’ livelihoods were dependent on the groundfish fishery and they were united in their need for regulatory access to rockfish. With the authority to control this access, DFO had a ‘hammer’ to hold over participants. DFO's ability to construct similarly persuasive incentives that would also motivate other stakeholders is weaker. Interests among non-commercial stakeholders vary significantly and there are divergent perspectives on resource ownership and the legitimacy of DFO's authority to manage the resource. Though beyond the scope of this paper, this raises important questions about the appropriateness of processes like the CIC if potentially legitimate stakeholders are marginalized or excluded from decision-making in the interest of expediting agreement.
Participants characterized consensus decision-making and independent facilitation as the keys to ensuring fairness. The disparities in the values of the fisheries and the degree of organization between sectors was a common cause for concern; wealthy sectors feared losing valuable exclusivity of access to their fisheries, while less wealthy sectors worried that the political clout of wealthy sectors could direct reforms in a way that would eliminate their ability to persist. Consensus provided essential security against these possibilities. Facilitation not only enforced this security, its independence from all vested interests, particularly government, was insulation against the potential for process manipulation that has hobbled other collaborative planning efforts [73] and [74].
The importance of these three elements to the CIC process supports much of the literature on successful shared decision-making. The necessity of sufficient group incentives to reach agreement has been noted in discussions of non-zero-sum game theory [75], dispute resolution [3], and negotiation [34]. The preceding paragraph highlights the value of consensus for avoiding the ‘tyranny of the majority’ which can result from alternate decision-making formats like voting [4]. Also, independent and professional facilitation is a commonly cited success factor in case studies of collaborative processes [76]. However, deriving a universally applicable theory of the elements essential to success may not be realistic. Past efforts, such as Harter's [77] eight hypothesized preconditions for success of negotiated rule-making (a collaborative decision-making format similar to that of the CIC) were later debated using cases where agreement was reached in the absence of some of Harter's preconditions [78]. Leach and Sabatier [79] found that the use of a professional facilitator was negatively correlated with the level of agreement reached in a review of 50 collaborative processes. Moreover, participants from some case studies have ranked different elements of greater importance than the three key elements identified in this case [79] and [80]. The variable importance and effect of procedural elements may be partly explained by the potential for collaborative planning processes to interact with the history and context of the case, and the experiences of all involved [81]. Thus, what may be useful is the development of theories about essential procedural elements that are responsive to certain contextual details of a case.
Contextual factors can not only affect the importance of procedural elements but also they themselves can be key determinants of process success; results from this case and others [76] and [82] document the significance of high-quality participants (Table 4). This suggests a fair and effective collaborative process is not obtained wholly through the planning method's design and structure alone.